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Thought we were done for the holidays? Think again. We’re still working away here at PBworks HQ. Today’s new feature is the addition of multi-value user profile fields.

Our user profiles are an important part of PBworks; Network Administrators can add any fields necessary to allow the members of their organization to share their skills and find one another. One drawback, however, has been that each profile field could only accept a single value. If you created an “Office” profile field, each person had to choose whether they belonged to New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, even if they split time between more than one.

Today, we’re enabling multi-value user profile fields. Now users can add multiple values to a single profile field, and this information will show up in search results.

Don’t worry; we’ll still support regular single-value profile fields; Network Administrators can choose whether or not to enable multi-value profile fields, and how they’re configured.

In the words of the classic advertising slogan, now you can select both “Tastes Great” and “Less Filling”!

Multi-value User Profile Fields are available on all business products, including Business Edition, Agency Hub, New Business Hub, and Legal Hub.

One of the convenient features that PBworks customers use a lot is the ability to upload multiple files at once. This is a great time-saver when uploading files like photos, images, or related documents.

Unfortunately, web browser security settings prevent you from downloading more than one file at a time. It’s not a PBworks restriction; it’s a web-wide restriction.

Fortunately, we’ve just released a feature that allows you to getaround this restriction and download multiple files, and even multiple folders.

The new Zip Download feature lets you compress multiple files into a single .zip file, which you can then download. You can include multiple files from a single folder, or even multiple folders and subfolders. When you extract the files from the .zip archive, all the folder and sub-folder relationships will be preserved.

While it was possible to download an entire workspace as a .zip file before, this was restricted to administrators, and seemed like overkill when you just want to download a subset of the workspace’s files. The new Zip Download feature is accessible to all users.

And even if you’re downloading a ton of files, we’ve made it easy. If you don’t want to wait for all the files to be processed for download, just click a link, and we’ll email you when the .zip file is ready for you.

Zip Download is now available at no extra cost to all our Business customers (including Agency Hub, New Business Hub, and Legal Hub).

Products, like living things, evolve in response to their environment. They build on what currently exists to add new functionality, or refine how things already work.

Take our latest feature, Network Folder Settings, for example.

PBworks began by allowing you to set up a single workspace for collaborating with your team.

We built on this by allowing you to bring together all your workspaces in a single network.

As the number of workspaces in networks proliferated, we allowed you to create network folders and subfolders to organize them.

Now we’re taking the next logical step by allowing you to edit your Network Folder Settings. For some time, you’ve been able to write descriptions and upload a logo for each workspace. Network Folders, on the other hand, were limited to a simple name.

Now, you can do the same with Network Folders.

If you’re using your network folders to organize the projects you’re executing for a key client, you can now upload that client’s logo and add a description.

If you choose not to many any changes, PBworks will continue to work for you just as it did before.

One of the great strengths of PBworks is that it’s easy to get started. Just create a wiki page, upload a file, or email a workspace, and you’re off and running. This openness helps encourage participation, and lets your team build on each others’ efforts.

But this openness has its downsides. It’s hard to determine an exact structure in advance, because in many cases, you’re on uncharted ground. This is the first time that much of this information has been organized anywhere other than on private hard drives or email inboxes. It’s also the case that as your team grows, you may find the need to reorganize.

While PBworks made it easy to move wiki pages, files, and even entire folders around within individual workspaces, moving content between workspaces was a pain. You had to manually cut-and-paste wiki pages, or download and re-upload files, and even then, this tedious manual process didn’t carry over key information like comments or revision history.

That’s why we’re delighted to announce that we’ve added “Move Between Workspaces.” Now you can move a wiki page, file, or folder, between workspaces in your PBworks network, and the moved item will retain all the relevant information, including comments, revision history, and tags. We’ll even remember which users had starred a particular item, and move that association as well!

The only things that aren’t moved are custom security settings (because the user rosters often differ between workspaces, it wouldn’t make any sense to carry these settings over) and changelist items (because if you edited a wiki page X before you moved it from Workspace Y to Workspace Z, that changelist item ought to appear on Workspace Y where it actually occurred).

If you’ve been holding off on reorganizing your network, now’s the perfect time to get started.

Move Between Workspaces is available on all network editions (Business Edition, Legal Edition, Agency Hub, and New Business Hub), immediately, and at no charge. For more details, visit our user manual.